“I don’t like fashion,” said the French designer Agnes b. For someone who
has spent four decades at the top of the fashion tree, it is a curious
confession to make. “I like clothes,” she added quickly as she put the
final touches to her autumn winter collection before her Paris fashion week
show Tuesday.
The creator who dressed pop icon David Bowie and cult film director David Lynch
is a living contradiction. She hates advertising, yet she married an
advertising guru; she loves
clothes but never goes to fashion shows.,”I never go to any of them, not to
Kenzo, nor Sonia Rykiel, nor Isabel Marant. I don’t want to know. Instead I
like to look to the streets,” she told
AFP.
“I love clothes you can keep and still wear after 10 or 20 years.” Forty
years after she opened her first shop in a workaday side street in central
Paris, the 74-year-old designer claimed that her philosophy has not altered.
Some things have changed though. “I dyed my first collection in my bath,”
she remembered, “and some of them weren’t even dry when the shop opened.” Now
Agnes Trouble — her real name, the “b” came from her first husband Christian
Bourgois — is the head of a fashion empire with a turnover of 300 million
euros (328 million US dollars) and hundreds of shops across the globe
including 141 in Japan alone.
Yet she made her name with deceptively simple pop-button cardigans and
striped T-shirts that were an almost instant hit in Paris, New York and
Tokyo.
“I always wanted to create well thought out clothes, made for modern life,
which you could rely on,” she said as she smoked a cigarette in her attic
office overlooking the Canal Saint-Martin.
With exhibitions and a book about to mark her singular career, she is
celebrating her 40 years in the business by indulging her twin passions —
clothes and art. The longtime art collector and gallerist, who has
dedicated part of her
fortune to bringing on young artists and film-makers, has commissioned a
line
of T-shirts from artist friends.
The designer was close to some the biggest art world stars of the last
three decades including New York painter Jean-Michel Basquiat — “we were as
thick as thieves” — and Keith Haring. Art seems to have been a release
from the relentless demands of running a
fashion house and her pet hate, advertising.
Even though she had a daughter with the late advertising guru Philippe
Michel, she boasted of never advertising her brand, which has always traded
on
its urbane, sober look. “I hate advertising. It’s pure manipulation,” she
said, claiming to have
been hugely marked by the revolutionary spirit of France’s May 1968 street
protests.
Despite coming from a right-wing family from Versailles outside Paris where
the “Sun King” Louis XIV built his gigantic palace, she has “always voted
for
the left” having been politicised by France’s long, bloody and failed war to
stop Algerian independence in her youth.
She married the publisher Christian Bourgois at only 17, had twins at 19
and was separated at 20. One of the twins, Etienne Bourgois, now runs the
business side of the brand. “We were on protest marches all the time,” she
recalled. A devout Catholic and environmentalist, she is hugely worried by
the rise of France’s far-right
National Front, tax evasion and the plight of refugees trying to reach
Europe.
She recently joined calls demanding that the French government stop
demolishing the migrant camp outside the northern port of Calais. “I am
different,” she said, “I am a straight talker.” Nor has having 2,000
employees convinced her that France’s 35-hour week is
economically unsustainable. She also proudly points to the fact that nearly
half of her clothes are made in France, a rarity in the globalised rag
trade.
With other fashion houses in a flap over whether to change to a “see now
buy now” system which would allow customers to buy straight from the
catwalk,
she plays it cool. “We do not make clothes that go out of fashion in two
months, so we don’t
have that problem,” she said.
You would think as a mother of five, grandmother of 16 and great
grandmother of two children, she might be thinking of putting up her feet.
But she does not seem obsessed with finding a successor. “I am going to
organise it little by little,” she said, but “I live from day to day, and I
love my work.” So don’t hold your breath. (AFP)
Photos: AFP / Miguel Medina